Loss
by Dragon Empress
Summary: A serial killer in custody who likes pretty girls, and a race against time to find his final victim. Is it really true that the good guys always win?


**I don't own it. Not a single word. **

- - -

"_When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet and treat her right, while the other wonders what her head would look like on a stick."_

_- Ed Kemper, the 'Co-Ed Killer'_

- - -

"Eventually…it just stopped being enough."

Through the glass the rest all observe, thinking despite themselves about how sometimes everybody loses, and watching Agent Derek Morgan do his bad-cop routine to death, a full three hours after he first started. Three hours of nothing. Maybe he would throw in the towel if a girl's life wasn't at stake. If things were different.

After all, the guy _is_ certainly giving them something; it's just not the something they were after. Young, well-educated and disarmingly handsome, this man is someone who has always enjoyed the soothing cadences of his own voice. He could talk forever and yet give them nothing.

"I gradually went through all the kinds of torture I could think of. I had to get to the one that felt _right._" White, square teeth flash out of a lightly-tanned face, the product of summer vacations spent in Miami. Next year, they will miss him at the Regent Hotel, discuss his absence and never know why. "I mean, strangulation was hard work, but I got to see the way they chocked and struggled, so it was worth it. I got to see the light as it left their eyes. That was good."

Restless, Morgan prowls around the interrogation room, like a big cat. Losing his patience. "Where," He repeats the question he's been asking all night. "Where is Bernadette Evans?" Unbeknownst to him, behind the glass Agent Hotchner is already thinking about pulling him out. A change in tactics. "Where is she, you son of a bitch?"

The fear, of course, is that they will be too late. That is always the fear, every time, that they cannot quite ever seem to do enough; that they can do everything possible and yet still fall short. The fear is that he will keep her a secret, buried in the darkest depths of his lizard-brain, and carry him with her to the cold, steel gurney and his lethal injection. Maybe she will stay hidden forever and never know peace.

Still, the monster-man talks; shaping words with his mouth and yet saying nothing. No revelation. Behind the looking-glass they wait for signs and clues and he gives them none. "I thought about drowning them, sometimes, but it was way too messy. And pretty inconvenient, too. And things like electrocution took, uh, a little too much juice." He giggles a little at the sound of his own witty repartee. He sees the minute swelling of Agent Morgan's pupils, an indication of his rapidly dwindling patience.

"Where," Each word is bitten off, clipped and tense with precision; laced through with threat. "Is Bernadette Evans?"

"I stabbed an old lady once, you know. Just to do it. She was homeless and crazy and really not my type at all. I watched her sleep down by the railway tracks and waited 'til it got dark. Then I crept up on her in her little box and cut her throat and she never even woke up…"

Morgan feels his temper fraying, knows there is only the slightest residue of his patience left. His hands are white at the knuckles, clenched so tightly, and his short, neat nails are digging vicious half-moons into his sensitive palms. One time, years ago, they bled. Now he knows himself a little better.

So he leaves the room, and the monster-man still talking away, orating to an empty theatre about all the animals that he slaughtered when he lived in Ohio with his parents. Then they moved. He went to college. The old, homeless lady was his very first. Yes. There is a timeline here, historical and oh-so precise, and he recites it in detail. He remembers every single aspect of every single crime, except for the last one. The one that matters. Now he says he can't be sure, and when he says it, he smiles.

Outside, Agent Morgan is feeling helpless and Agents Rossi and Hotchner are taking off their jackets and rolling up their metaphorical shirt-sleeves. One pats Morgan on the shoulder consolingly, and the other says, "You tried your best" in a tone that seems both genuine and yet not comforting in the slightest. It is time to change the game mid-play. Morgan stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Agent Prentiss (who still to him sometimes, despite all her experience, looks so young and unsuited to this kind of horror) and watches the door to the interrogation room as it bangs shut. Somewhere behind them, out of sight, Agent Reid is in the squad room drawing up graphs, charting out irregularities and body-dump sites and trying to figure out the next dot in the pattern. All around him, the local P.D. eye him occasionally, sceptically, taking in the coloured pens and the unfortunate sweater-vest; many of them fail to see how he could be of any use to the F.B.I. at all. A schoolboy professor playing at being a policeman; the threat of his gun-holster somehow neutralised by it's proximity to his skinny hips.

But his mind is racing faster than they could ever think, in their small-town scepticism regarding the existence of boy-geniuses. His brain is saturated with an untold weight of frightening images, crime-scene photographs, and potential places to hide a woman in the immediate area, if you really, really want to torture and murder her. Somewhere quiet, secure and dark. Somewhere far away from where anyone cares about what their neighbours might be doing.

From out of the long shadow cast by the interrogation room, Morgan comes to stand beside him, looking drained and hot-eyed and completely on edge. He picks up a pin (fire-hydrant red) and sticks it in the map.

"He says that his first kill was a homeless woman down by the railroad tracks. Here." Morgan taps the pin with one, thick finger. He sees, out of the corner of his vision (as Reid stiffens and stops, his mouth falling open a tiny fraction) the sudden-ness of _knowing _as it shines all over the young man's face.

Reid looks at Morgan (they are close together), and he says, "I know where she is."

- - -

Sirens and lights and big, black cars can only ever serve to advertise police presence, even in the growing darkness of a cool, spring evening on the East Coast, in a place where no-one is really listening. Every once in a while all their noise and commotion is upstaged by the rumbling of the freight trains as they storm by, and the high, hysterical wail of the electric horn that all train drivers just seem to love blowing for no real reason at all. Just to do it.

As it is, the dirty freight containers are piled up high into the gathering dark, looming over every single member of the B.A.U. team and casting a great, encroaching shadow. They are all ashen, grey-faced and dull-looking in a way that cannot possibly be explained away by the ever-increasing lack of light. Agent Hotchner is on his phone talking quietly, and the rest are just…standing there, feeling like appendixes and watching as a lone, yet conspicuous black bag (just large enough to fit a corpse) is wheeled out of one of the containers and loaded into a waiting ambulance. Around them all the lights are still flashing, but the sirens are off. The urgency of the moment has long since passed.

These are the bad ones. Inside the container there is a vastness of blood, across the floors and up the walls. Slowly, it begins to dry and harden. The crime scene people are all wearing HAZMAT suits and knee-high galoshes. The coroner's early estimation is that she bled out, over maybe three or four hours, from a carefully made knife-wound to the thigh. She bled out all of the blood she had, slowly, and alone.

"So we never really had a chance at all." Reid mumbles, more to his scuffed, brown shoes than to his assembled co-workers. All Agent Rossi does is look at him blackly, before walking away towards the cars. These things will always continue to be hard, even on the oldest hands.

"She was already dead." Prentiss agrees, looking at the deep, blue hollows beneath Reid's eyes and thinking that they add so much age to his young face. "He wanted us to find her in that condition."

"It was his final bit of fun before we put him away, and he felt like he had to make it count."

"So we'd never forget him." All of this small-talk is pointless and unnecessary, but what's worse is the silence that would otherwise occur. All of them are afraid to say what they are really thinking; a quote from the demon who got the last laugh.

"_Eventually…it just stopped being enough."_

Sometimes everybody loses. Even the best. Agent Morgan doesn't want to make small-talk with anybody, and he doesn't want to storm off like Rossi did either. He doesn't want to have to tell the Evans that there was nothing that anyone could have done for their daughter except bring her home dead, so that they wouldn't have to wonder. It is always said that the wondering is worse. Here today, Morgan is not so sure.

Over closer to the crime scene, Agent Hotchner snaps his cell phone shut and then turns his back on the place where the stained, white jumpsuits are working away quickly, going about their tasks with federal efficiency. He will take on the burden of informing the family alone, tonight, and carry with him forever the responsibility of failure.

He says to his team, "Let's go back to the station," and doesn't wait to see if any of them will follow. He knows that they're all there behind him, despondent, and that the plane ride back to Quantico tomorrow will be quiet and thoughtful and stained deeply with regret.

They will be gone at first light, all of them; all black cars and ready-bags and standing on the tarmac as the new sun weakly twinkles; as the remains of yesterday fade into darkness, and they prepare themselves for whatever will come next.

- - -

_And as things fell apart_

_Nobody paid much attention_

_- (Nothing But) Flowers_

_Talking Heads _


End file.
